Reform

In March, just before Artemis II rounded the far side of the Moon, the Transport Secretary had her own lunar encounter. Heidi Alexander claims that a ‘moon crater’-sized pothole forced her Mini off the road in Oxfordshire. She is far from alone. Pothole casualties in Britain rose from 270 in 2020 to 393 in 2024, including six dead. An RAC Europe survey found that 62 per cent of British drivers thought European roads are better maintained. Britain’s pothole problem is a story of government dysfunction. Local authorities seem unable to perform their basic duties; meanwhile, council tax continues to rise, bin collection becomes more infrequent and public spaces continue to deteriorate.

When Zia Yusuf first walked into the headquarters of Reform UK, he gestured at the empty room and asked: ‘Where’s the office?’ Ed Sumner, the party’s director of communications, replied: ‘This is it. It’s empty. This is the party.’ That was not even two years ago. Since then, Nigel Farage and Yusuf have built a party from scratch and expect to be the biggest winners in the local elections on 7 May. With more than 270,000 members, their grassroots base is the largest in Britain, bigger than both Labour and the Tories. ‘I would argue no party has built political infrastructure and established itself more quickly in British history than Reform,’ Yusuf says.

Murton is a rather frowsy former pit village in County Durham, about half a dozen miles down the A19 from Sunderland. Chip shops, tanning salons, elderly people with no teeth on mobility scooters, huge cannabis farm in the disused old Co-op store which has just been busted by the Old Bill. It almost became a ghost town after the pit closed in 1991, but they built a largeish retail park on the outskirts so people could spend money they didn’t have on useless shit and bad food. Its north side has one of the lowest average incomes in the county (£34,400) and a much lower than average life expectancy. Benefit take-up somewhat high, above 50 per cent. I hope, in these few sentences, I have brought the place to life for you.

Over the last week, I have been stalking Pierre Poilievre. The leader of the Canadian Conservative Party has been in Westminster to renew the bonds of Anglospheric amity; consequently, I had the pleasure of watching him speak on two successive evenings. The arc of history is long, but it bends towards Robert Jenrick Until a year or so ago, Poilievre was the Prince Across the Atlantic – a punchy and pugnacious Conservative would who had united his party around a popular and populist message of more housebuilding, tackling inflation and championing those working-class voters that Canada’s Liberals had taken for granted for too long. He built a hefty lead over Justin Trudeau and topped the polls among young voters.

There is an old joke about Nigel Farage, put about by former colleagues. ‘Why is Nigel like a beech tree?… Because nothing grows under him.’ The comparison to this acid-leafed tree which stifles all beneath it is one the Reform UK leader has never accepted. ‘I don’t fall out with people,’ he once said. ‘They fall out with me.’ Like Tintin, Farage has enjoyed many different adventures in different guises: ‘Nigel in America’, ‘Nigel in the Jungle’, ‘Nigel in the City’. This week, we got another: ‘Nigel and the Gang of Four’, the leader who seeks power only to yield it to others. Four names were unveiled as part of Reform’s new ‘shadow cabinet’ to show he is building something bigger than himself.

British by-elections are often prolonged affairs, dragging on for months. Yet in the Manchester seat of Gorton and Denton – once home to Myra Hindley and the Gallagher brothers – campaigners are on a frantic dash to canvas the 82,000 voters before polling day on 26 February. ‘It is a proper three-horse race,’ says one. ‘And it’s coming down to a photo finish.’ Gorton has been red since the days of Ramsay MacDonald – but now a WhatsApp scandal threatens to end Labour’s hegemony. Andrew Gwynne, the departing MP, has quit over a series of lewd messages. Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, blocked from standing to replace him, has instead become the spectre of this contest.

Kemi Badenoch’s travails with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party have taken me back to the politics of the 1980s and the Social Democratic party’s challenge to Labour at the time. Like Reform now, the SDP sought to replace one of the main incumbent parties of British politics, but the SDP’s case went beyond finishing off Labour. Like Farage now, they argued that the whole two-party system was ailing, that neither was capable of providing a political home for millions of voters who felt unrepresented by them, and that each was, in their own way, so stuck in their furrows that only a new party could give Britain the leadership it needed. The project did not end in success despite this initial message at one point commanding 50 per cent in the polls.